Hound them out

TO JUSTIFY the sacking of decent managers, football club directors have cited enough laughable misdemeanours to fill the charge book at the Keystone Kophouse.

Ray Harford didn't smile enough for Luton's liking, Ron Atkinson was more popular than the egomaniac chairman of Atletico Madrid, Dave Sexton only came second in the championship with Manchester United and Johan Cruyff was inconsiderate enough to have a heart attack while at Barcelona.

All these excuses and more not to mention losing a couple of matches or tarrying with the chairman's wife - would represent gross ingratitude even the occupants of the game's boardrooms were all paragons of virtue.

But now the truth is out. At least at Newcastle United.

If Kevin Keegan had behaved a tenth as badly as Douglas Hall and Freddy Shepherd, his removal from St James' Park would have been a hundred times easier to understand.

The bullet would have been precisely what he deserved.

Not so, apparently, the bosses themselves. So deeply entrenched are football's double standards that Hall and Shepherd are going nowhere.

Not if they can help it.

Not content with utterly disgracing not only themselves which, it can be argued, is matter between their private conscience and the marital bed - but also their club, they now

heap vile hypocrisy on foul disrepute.

Their apology was as half-baked as their intelligence.

Their defence - that they were egged on to ridicule everyone they could think of in Newcastle and were too drunk to remember what they were saying - is as risible as a murderer pleading insanity brought on by the dripping of the bathroom tap.

Better to throw yourself on the mercy of the judge. Or, in the case of Hall and Shepherd, bow to the court of popular opinion.

Public unrest has been used to oust many a manager, also.

Yet, even in the face of universal anger in Geordieland, these two bury their heads in the collective bosom of their hired floozies and refuse to resign.

Not only would any manager have been out on his ear now, but any player who had insulted his club and damaged the game like this would have been heavily fined and lengthily suspended.

The FA, so quick to jump every daft footballer, is coming down on these two dolts like tiny feather.

It smacks of one rule for the poor and no rules for the rich.

But if they hope that this weekend's pause in the League programme will be long enough for it all to be forgotten, they delude themselves.